Getting lost above the treeline

Travel notes from explorations in Gilgit Baltistan

The 50-plus-year-old uncle in a black polo shirt is perched on top of his white horse as I walk down the trail towards him. Suddenly he sees me and raises his arms up above his horse’s thin back, like I had insulted him in a previous lifetime and he has been looking for me ever since. “All alone?” he shouts as I stop just in front of a pile of wet cow manure and the young man guiding him.

“Well,” I say, looking around at the billions of Himalayan pine trees, the miles of glaciers melting into flashing rivers of water, the family of magpies singing love ghazals to the Nanga Parbat mountain range behind me, “not really, I guess.”

But the uncle doesn’t seem to see any of this. “No, no,” he says, pointing his horse reigns ahead to his caravan of five friends, “I mean, no friends, huh?”

The Rakhiot Glacier melting below us suddenly stops thawing. The sun curving around the Rakaposhi peak behind him stops rotating. The morinda spruce trees making sugar through their trillions of leaves stop photosynthesising. “No, not today, boss,” I finally say. And the uncle passes me with an “Okay, enjoy.”

The day I’m supposed to fly to Gilgit, my flight is canceled “due to weather” and I’m stranded in Islamabad for 24 hours, with the hope that the flight the next day would somehow takeoff. Of course, I have absolutely no plan of what I would do if I eventually reach Gilgit, so at least I…